This is another one of my bread pudding recipes. It’s easy, quick and seems just like a cake. So take your day-old stale bread and put it to some delicious use. This pudding is packed with lemon zest which gives it some amazing aroma and flavour. Your body will also be happy for all that vitamin C you’ll be having in the cold & flu season. Either way, even if you never get colds and never have leftover stale bread, it’s worth making this pudding for the delicious experience.

Ingredients:

8 slices of day-old stale bread

4 eggs

3 Tbsp applesauce (oil if you have no applesauce)

2 cups milk

1/2 cup sugar

zest of two lemons

optional: a drop of yellow food colouring

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F.

Cut crusts off your bread and discard them.

Chop the bread into small pieces and place in a greased baking dish.

In a bowl whisk eggs, applesauce, milk, sugar, zest and colouring if using.

Once well blended pour the mixture on the bread pieces.

Press the bread with a fork until every piece is submerged in the mixture.

I come from Poland, where when I was growing up, Halloween was heard of but certainly not celebrated. I am just that old. And I remember very well, when I first saw Halloween in Chicago, what a shock that was, all these pumpkins and skeletons out on people’s lawns seemed such overkill. Awesome overkill, I must add. And I remember as well, my first Halloween in Ireland, when a coworker showed up in a full pirate costume to his office job. I barely knew what to say, that’s how surprised I was. There were more people showing up dressed up that day and some years later I was happily dressing up with them too. I have absolutely nothing against Halloween. It’s an awesome, happy holiday.

But I am just totally inexperienced in it, and I often feel like I don’t understand it. So whenever I try to do something for Halloween, I feel like I totally don’t know what I am doing. For this year’s Halloween post, I wanted to make muffins with red cream cheese filling. It was supposed to look like blood. Blood in muffins, I don’t know. Is that a good idea? Or not at all?

So I started experimenting and whatever I added to cream cheese, it came up cute, pastel pink colour, which would be great for a 4 year old girl’s cake or something. Not the colour of blood, certainly. I tried red food colouring, until I ran out of it, I tried cherry juice, red currant juice. Forget it, I ended up with cutsie pink muffins.

And that was my best idea anyway…

So I decided that I should stop pretending that I know anything about Halloween and trying to make something I don’t know how to make. This is too much BS. So instead, you’re getting this recipe: banana pancakes. They are sweet, delicious, they taste like bananas and you can eat them on all days of the year, Halloween or not.

Ingredients:

3 ripe bananas

4 eggs

1/4 cup flour

icing sugar for decoration

1 Tbsp oil or butter for frying

Peel bananas and mash them in a bowl until more or less smooth. Add eggs and flour and whisk until the mixture is uniform.

Heat the butter in a pan and pour the dough in small portions. These pancakes are best when they are not too big and not too thick. Small pancakes are easy to flip and stay in one piece much easier.

For me carrot cake is just the perfect dessert to eat in the Autumn. Here in Europe pumpkin desserts are not really popular and as much as I can find some pumpkins in the shops here in Norway, I haven’t seen any pumpkin tarts or pies sold anywhere. My Polish Grandma, on the other hand, really likes pumpkin, but only as a compote, like in this article. But carrot cake seems to be a little less scary to Europeans. 🙂 So, let’s celebrate the delicious carrot and have some carrot cake.

Ingredients:

5 medium carrots

2 1/2 c sugar

3 handfuls of raisins

4 eggs

1 cup rapeseed oil

2 1/2 cups flour

2 tsp vanilla extract

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

4 tsp ground cinnamon

For frosting:

1/2 cup cream cheese

3 Tbsp powdered sugar

Optional:

yellow food colouring

1 tsp orange zest

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F.

Grate carrots or use a food processor to get tiny pieces. Add raisins to the carrots and set aside.

In a bowl beat eggs until fluffy while slowly adding sugar, vanilla extract and oil.

In a separate container mix all the dry ingredients: flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt.

Add the egg mixture into the dry and stir until combined. Add carrots and raisins and stir to distribute.

Pour the mixture to two loaf trays or one round form and one loaf.

Bake for 45 to 50 minutes. Check with a cocktail stick.

To make the frosting combine cream cheese and powdered sugar. Add yellow food colouring and orange zest if using.

Apply frosting only when the cake has cooled down. Store frosted cake in the fridge.

I promised to entertain a person who suddenly told me she had to be on a gluten free and milk free diet, due to her doctor’s instructions. I made it look like it was going to be no problem at all and only then went on to panic at home. I looked on Pinterest, on Yummly and a couple of other pages and I was just overwhelmed with possibilities. Many of them asked for types of flour I have never heard about and I was a little bit lost. Next day I went to my local grocery store to find one, sad gluten free flour mix, which was way overpriced. So off I went to my favourite location to shop for food: a store with goods imported from the Middle East. I buy all my spices there, delicious brown rice in 5kg bags and I frequently buy things I have never tried and google the solutions to them at home. I was never disappointed, a lot of those foods are really magical.

Back to my story though. I looked at their shelves and found a 1 1/2 kg bag of rice flour. I immediately knew that this is the amount and the type of stuff I’d be happy experimenting with.

I was prepared for these muffins to be too dense, gloopy and maybe chewy. They are none of these things. As you can see they raised very well and I promise you that the flavour is also great. I wanted to do a vanilla bean muffins just so that I could have a base gluten free recipe on hand whenever I need it. This is the result of a couple of experiments and this is the best one so far. I am sure it would be easy to modify it slightly in order to make a chocolate or fruit muffin. This queen, however is a vanilla bean!

This cake is the definition of softness and comfort. That might be because I love milk and I drink it on its own or as cocoa. I add a lot of it to coffee and I can’t really imagine life without milk. So when I realised one day that again I bought a lot of milk and there is now 6 liters of it in the fridge, I started looking for ways of using more of it in cake. This recipe was born as a version of a hot milk cake. Recipes for hot milk cake can be found all over the internet but I tweaked mine to no end and added the irresistible peaches. I hope you’ll enjoy it because we certainly did and it disappeared quickly.

Ingredients:

4 eggs

1 1/4 cup sugar

2 1/4 cup all purpose flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1 1/4 cup milk ( I use 1% fat ‘light’ milk)

100g (a little less than 1/2 cup) butter

1/2 cup applesauce (you can use double the amount of butter instead if you have no applesauce)

2 tsp vanilla extract

a big can of peaches, which gives around 10 halves

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F.

Place the peaches in the bottom of your baking tray, bellies up.

Put the eggs and salt in a bowl of an electric whisk and start mixing on high.

While doing that, slowly add all of the sugar and vanilla extract. Whisk until the mixture is light and turns white and not yellow from the yolks anymore.

Switch over to low speed and add the applesauce (skip this step if you’re using double butter instead).

I sift the flour and mix it with baking powder, just because I don’t want the now aerated mixture to lose its air.

Now, while the dough is mixing on low and you’re adding flour tablespoon by tablespoon heat the milk and butter in a saucepan.

As soon as the butter is melted start adding to the dough as well, alternating between flour and the buttery milk.

Once everything is added and mixed, pour the mixture onto the peaches.

Bake for 35 to 40 minutes. The stick test seems to work unless you jab a peach with your stick, so keep trying. 🙂

Enjoy and good luck fighting your family or housemates who will suddenly have so many things to do in the kitchen and will only ‘accidentally’ nibble on this cake.